The World Is Waiting for You by Tara Grove

Author:Tara Grove
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970911
Publisher: The New Press

II.

A few words first about empathy and reason prior to the story of my remarkable discovery of Empathy Deficit Disorder, a feat sure to be honored with great renown. In the May 20, 2013, edition of the New Yorker, Paul Bloom wrote a concise (if not exactly Lincolnesque) essay called “The Baby in the Well.” It’s a critique of our ready rush to empathy as the answer to all the world’s ills, including the ones we so often see in our work. The essay’s title refers to a story I remember well, as will your parents. In 1987, a baby named Jessica McClure fell into a well somewhere in Texas. Bloom goes on to mention similar well-recalled events, from another child who in 1949 fell into some other well, to those without happy endings, such as the 2005 disappearance of a teenager named Natalee Holloway while vacationing in Aruba. “Why,” he asks, “do people respond to these misfortunes and not to others?” Bloom—like many of you here, a student of psychology—reviews the works of his colleagues: “The psychologist Paul Slovic points out that, when Holloway disappeared, the story of her plight took up far more television time than the concurrent genocide in Darfur. Each day, more than 10 times the number of people who died in Hurricane Katrina die because of preventable diseases and more than 13 times as many perish from malnutrition.”

Empathy, Bloom concludes, “has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate.” As to how the term is innumerate, he makes (for those of you not leaving UD with a degree in applied mathematics) the following point: “The number of victims hardly matters—there’s little psychological difference between hearing about the suffering of 5,000 and that of 500,000. Imagine reading that 2,000 people just died in an earthquake in a remote country, and then discovering that the actual number of deaths was 20,000. Do you now feel 10 times worse? To the extent that we recognize the numbers as significant, it’s because of reason, not empathy.” The essayist concludes as follows: “Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value of the lives of those we love.”

I went back and read the essay again yesterday, since I so often rely on empathy and work in such “remote” countries, including one not so remote from Delaware in which a recent earthquake took more than 200,000 lives. Bloom’s tone may be grumpy—and I’m not saying that because he’s a professor at Yale—but I get his point: empathy is not only innumerate but also an “unstable emotion,” like pity or mercy or compassion. But can unstable emotions like empathy and compassion be transformed into something more enduring? Can a spark of empathy once ignited—however briefly, however tenuously—lead to reasoned decisions and to compassionate policies that might transform our

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